Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report – January 2015

Every month I will publish a monthly report like this to show the progress of this blog as well as the results of other activities I have carried out.

So what have I done in January ?

January was a busy month for me, as I have been executing my 2015 goal. But it was also quite a slow month in general, as most people are still in the new year mood, what with Chinese New Year just around the corner in February.

That said, I still have plenty of good news and positive events to share in this report!

Personal Development – 2015

As part of my 2015 goal, I made a commitment to meet up and network with other entrepreneurs, blog readers and anyone who might need my help.

I managed to meet the following Entrepreneurs in Singapore who also happen to be my blog readers. It was the first time meeting my readers – so it was very exciting, and I’m thankful they turned out to be such interesting and fruitful meet ups!

The first blog reader I met was Quek Kai Hock, founder of the personal development blog Smart About My Money. We talked over lunch and I offered my insights on how he could improve his traffic for his website using SEO and other sources of traffic.

Tom Attenborough from 9tolife.com was the second reader I met. We talked about my switchbox SEO experiment; it was an interesting conversation and it’s really great to connect with someone outside Asia for the first time.

Time Tracking Experiment

I also started to track my time to see where my time is being spent on, as outlined in my goal for 2015.

For the month of January i spent a total 175 hours on my desktop and laptop.

27% of the time was spent on business related like client work, SEO and project management.

Another 27% was spent on outlook, Gmail, and other forms of communication tool like WhatsApp and skype.

11% of the time was spend on surfing Chrome, forums and maybe types of windows application.

The rest of the time (18%) was spent on facebook and some other tasks. It was pretty cool to see that I spent almost 1.5hrs to work on my business daily and another 1.5hrs on communication.

In case you you don’t know, I still have a full time job and also daddy duty at home. So to spend 1.5hrs daily on my business is really significant, and doesn’t leave me with much time for entertainment. I believe I can increase my productivity score to 70 for the month of Feb.

This time tracking serves as a way to track my productivity, and to remind me to stay on track to keep my productivity score above 50.

Joseph-ho.com Progress

For the month of Jan 15, my traffic was down 4.8% as compared to Dec 15. However I was quite shocked – though with fewer users and sessions, I still gained 50.84% pageviews compared to the month of Dec 15.

This shows that people are reading more and staying longer on my blog because my avg. session duration increased by 106.27%! And the bounce rate decreased by 24.5% which is a good sign for a website.

I did not do much SEO for this blog, as I was using this blog as a test to see whether I could drive non-SEO traffic. This serves as part of the learning process on the importance of other traffic sources instead of a constant reliance on SEO traffic.

As you can see, blog referral traffic was up by 149.5% because of 2 guest blog posts that were posted on Matthewwoodward.co.uk.

Not a bad return for only 2 hours of work to create the content.

Authority Site : Food Niche Progress

I started this site as a hobby niche site, but eventually it evolved into a an authority site, which means a bigger site. If you are interested in learning how I turned this niche site into an authority site, you can check out my experiment here.

I expected the traffic to be low for Jan 15, however, I was wrong. Because of re-posting old list content on Facebook, I managed to get viral traffic, which increased traffic by 91.43%. Nothing much else was done – as you can see, adsense earnings remained stable at $300 + without much promotion.

I also thought it’s a good idea to show social media web properties for my authority food site; so I began tracking it in January as well.

eCommerce Authority Site

This is an experimental site run by my team partner and a local company. We get a 15% commission for every sale made online.

For the month of Jan, there is an increasing of traffic up to 52% and 37% increase of pageviews. Part of the reason of the increasing of traffic was due to organic search traffic.

I actually used this site for my switchbox seo experiment and the site rankings have improved.

You can see that the number one keyword is the brand keyword; however the top 3 buying keywords which I am targeting had a very high number of clicks and good CTR even though is not in the top 20. Imagine how much money we would make if they were to rank within the top 5?

Sales for the site is definitely good, and for the 3rd straight month the site revenues have stayed above $1000. Not much maintenance is required for this ecommerce site and most of the shipments are handled by the vendor themselves.

Signing off

The holidays are over and is time to put even more effort towards my 2015 goals. Over the next few weeks, I will be announcing another JV eCommerce authority site. It be will be another great source of income and I have good faith in this upcoming project!

Lastly, just another a reminder – if you need information on any of my skill sets and expertise, or even just a simple chat to say hi, you can schedule a 30-minute Skype call with me through this link.